AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, I wanted to move from the Middle East to academia here at home, connected to the Middle East, and that is your being rejected by Yale University, though it looked like you were the top candidate to be a professor there. And I wanted to read to you from the Wall Street Journal from April and get your response. It says, "Meanwhile, Yale faces a new challenge in the next few days. The university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a Professor of Contemporary Middle East Studies." It says, "Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts: first, his scholarship is largely on 19th century Middle East, not on contemporary issues." Then it quotes Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly, saying "He's abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary. Mr. Cole’s postings at his blog, ‘Informed Comment,’ appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories," the article says, and then goes on to say, "In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud. Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering," the article says. "He calls Israel the most dangerous regime in the Middle East. That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy." That from the Wall Street Journal in April. Can you respond to all of it and what happened to your attempt to become a professor at Yale?

JUAN COLE: Well, first of all, I never applied for a job at Yale. Some people at Yale asked if they could look at me for a senior appointment. I said, "Look all you want." So that's up to them. Senior professors are like baseball players. You’re being looked at by other teams all the time. If it doesn't result in an offer, then nobody takes it seriously. Some neo-con journalists have tried to make this a big scandal. Who knows what their hiring process is like, what things they were looking for? I think it's a tempest in a teapot.

With regard to the press attacks on myself, of course, John Fund just made up those quotes that he attributed to me. I never said anything like that Israel is the most dangerous regime in the Middle East. It's a lie. And all kinds of lies are told about my stances all the time, despite the fact that everything that I've said about these issues can be keyword searched on Google, and you can see the actual quote fairly easily. Instead a concateny of lies has been put together and attributed to me.

And, well, you know, this comes with the territory. I don't care. You know, Thomas Jefferson and all of our predecessors, as American intellectuals, had been maligned and their characters impugned and all kinds of lies told about them. It's part of being an American. We have a First Amendment. We have freedom of speech. If John Fund wants to tell lies about me, let him tell lies. I don't care. If people want to believe them, let them believe them. I don't care about that either.

The fact is that John Fund came on television and said that he thought it had been a big mistake not to support the coming to power in the early 1990s of the Islamic Salvation Front. Part of the Islamic Salvation Front was Ahmed Ressam, who later attempted to bomb LAX. So John Fund has a big problem, it seems to me, with his stances. If he wants to attribute these kinds of sentiments to other people, he should explain why he takes these stances himself. And why does the Wall Street Journal support someone who can't get his facts right and who supports the Islamic Salvation Front coming to power in Algeria? So, you know, it's a rough and ready world out there. If you can't stand the heat, don't come into the kitchen.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, I want to thank you very much for joining us, Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His website is “Informed Comment,” where he provides a daily roundup of news and events in the Middle East, and we will link to it at democracynow.org, joining us from Ann Arbor.

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